Tainted Grail Update – Guardian Changes

This week’s early access update for Awaken Realms Digital’s Arthurian RPG Tainted Grail kicks off a new community event and overhauls the game’s Guardian class. It also shows off some work in progress art that will be coming to the game shortly. Here are the text bits:

Hey everyone!

Today we have yet another update. While a bit short, we could not be more excited about what’s coming with Patch 0.95! Everything is slowly coming together – gameplay, visuals, and story implementations… and boy, oh boy… we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved in these three months since our release in Early Access!

We hope we will bring you a lot of fun – polished, this time!

Let’s start with the summary of the Berserker event and let us just say that you guys are absolutely crazy for breaking the 1 million DMG barrier :O

Congrats to the top spots and to all players who participated in the event, we hope you liked it!

Guardian is ready for battle!

This week, Guardian will face the challenge of the event!

But we changed a few things in this class, making it a little bit more dynamic and… well, fun 😉

Here are two BIG changes:

Guardian’s passive ability

Old Guardian passive (that one allowing you to save 1 card at the end of the round) felt good on paper… but we just couldn’t stand it in the game. We constantly had the feeling that it was causing additional downtime and turned out to be an overall frustrating mechanic.

We decided to change it in a way that would still reflect the spirit of this rune (defensive play and card management) but also add a little bit offensive bite.

New Guardian passive – Focus

If you haven’t received any damage last turn, become Focused (where Focused means +50% damage dealt). This effect stacks with itself each turn you do not receive any damage.

Once you receive a hit from an enemy, you lose all accumulated Prepared buffs.

Chain is back!

Some of the Tainted Grail veterans might remember old days of Guardian, where you could do endless loops and generally crush everything on your way. Multiple iterations nerfed Guardian and also Chain cards.

Currently, when you use a card with the “Chain” keyword, the Chain stack resets to 0. This was mainly introduced to stop the endless loop problem.

But meanwhile, a few weeks ago we have introduced a more elegant fix to that problem, where we added another “temporary graveyard” for cards played. Long story short – you can play every card only once per turn (not counting Return cards).

Thanks to that, we can come back to Chain not resetting after use. Probably it will lead to Guardian power spike ; )

Obviously those changes are still subject to some balancing and testing, but we hope they will provide a bit more interesting playstyle for Guardian and bring a lot of fun!

We also can’t wait to see what you can do with this reforged rune in the weekly event!

You may also be interested in last week’s update that was primarily focused on bug fixing.